Gnewt

The lid seals the entire Instant Pot, not the insert (which is the thing that would go in the fridge).

I had an affected YubiKey -- Yubico shipped out a replacement immediately. It's inconvenient if you have an old YubiKey, but the replacement process is simple.

Additionally, you can always generate GPG keys on your machine, transfer them to the YubiKey, and then delete the keys from the local machine. It depends if that's an acceptable exposure for your threat model, but for me, having the keys locally for a couple minutes is fine.

You place full trust in the provider of your VPN. If you'd like to use PIA, you have to trust them -- and you can make your own decisions about that. I think it's fairly reasonable to trust them based on available evidence, but it really depends on your threat model.

It depends on your threat model. If you want anonymity, you'll have to take further steps. Self-hosting on a VPS that's linked to you protects you only from your ISP, which is enough if you're concerned about your ISP selling your traffic data. Of course, you'll need to trust your VPS' outbound ISP... but I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that consumer ISPs are more likely to sell your data than larger providers.

If they can't see the contents, they also can't see the URL -- both are encrypted.

This matches my experience! I thought there was a rigid set of instructions and that if I couldn't follow them perfectly I would ruin the meal. Definitely the programmer in me :). And definitely, in retrospect, a totally misguided notion.

I wonder if you might be approaching the problem from the wrong direction. In all likelihood, you're not going to make any grave mistakes -- you're just going to make food slightly below par a couple times until you hone in your cooking skills. It's probably worth practicing cooking some simple meals until that sense of paranoia diminishes rather than trying to cater to it.

(I honestly used to avoid cooking because I wasn't good at it -- the only thing to "fix" that was to start cooking, and now I feel comfortable with it and cook all the time)

For me, it's a joy to hear people talk about the things they are passionate about. I go out of my way to ask people to just talk about the things that interest them. I would be surprised if a majority of HN users did not have similar feelings.

Agreed. It seems really strange to me that we societally accept success (in the capitalist sense) as something of positive moral utility -- or at least something that we get to contrast against the happiness/suffering of human beings.

I used to be fond of trying out new desktop environments, playing with "fun" stuff etc. At this point in my life I no longer gain a lot of enjoyment from just fiddling around (at least not usually). These days a laptop is just a tool -- and ideally, one that works efficiently so I can do the work I need to do and get on with my life.

The reason I've used a MacBook Pro for so many years is because it really does "just work," or at least consistently has in the past. It's very, very rare (in my personal experience) to run into any system-related issues. I used to run Linux on a laptop and spent ages fiddling around with my Xorg, troubleshooting wireless issues, dealing with buggy desktop environments, etc...

I think a lot of other people are in a similar position, in that the "neat things" and "fiddling" are a negative. I just want a machine that works well with minimal configuration. Is desktop Linux at that stage right now? Popular opinion seems to say no, but I haven't actually tried running desktop Linux since for years.

(I do use Linux every single day, but it's always over ssh/tmux)

This is very easy and cheap to implement with Asterisk and a no-name VoIP provider. I've done some messing around with phones in the past and I would expect that Twilio has little/no effect on this space -- the barriers to being spammy with Twilio are higher than with Asterisk and another VoIP provider.

The US actually had a lot of contactless cards for a while, before EMV, but it seems like that's been phased out (outside of the use of NFC via Apple Pay / Android Pay.

Of course. The whole points of a) the bill of rights and b) the entire system of checks and balances is to make things more "difficult". This is as the framers intended, explicitly to avoid things like judicial overreach as is happening in the iPhone case.

The "inefficiency" caused by the system of checks and balances is by design... sort of like a delay after the entry of an incorrect password.